Posts Tagged ‘Sally Kohn’

“We have to start shaping the world we want with our clicks, because clicking is a public act.”

When we feed on buzz, are we really nourishing our souls?

Most intelligent, motivated people believe that we shape the world with our choices — that subverting our convictions to some this-is-just-the-way-it-is ideology is unacceptable, disempowering resignation. And yet even the best-intentioned people often get caught in believing this on an abstract level, while making passive, semi-automatic choices in our daily lives that float us further from rather than closer to the world we say we desire. Just like all drivers think that traffic is other people, we tend to consider our culture’s questionable products the result of other people’s questionable choices, forgetting that culture is always an aggregate of which we are invariably a part.

In this excellent and urgently necessary short TED talk, journalist, community organizer and political commentator Sally Kohn takes on the epidemic of clickbait, reminding us with equal parts wit and wisdom that our mindless media gluttony, which Alan Watts aptly termed “orgasm without release” more than half a century ago, is shaping the very culture we so readily sneer at — because, lest we forget, clickbait is to culture what cliché is to language and its cumulative eradication is just as much the sum total of our individual choices.

We all say we hate this crap. The question is whether you’re willing to make a personal sacrifice to change it. I don’t mean giving up the Internet. I mean changing the way you click, because clicking is a public act. It’s no longer the case that a few powerful elites control all the media and the rest of us are just passive receivers. Increasingly, we’re all the media. I used to think, oh, okay, I get dressed up, I put on a lot of makeup, I go on television, I talk about the news. That is a public act of making media. And then I go home and I browse the web and I’m reading Twitter, and that’s a private act of consuming media. I mean, of course it is. I’m in my pajamas.

Wrong.

Everything we blog, everything we Tweet, and everything we click is a public act of making media. We are the new editors. We decide what gets attention based on what we give our attention to. That’s how the media works now. There’s all these hidden algorithms that decide what you see more of and what we all see more of based on what you click on, and that in turn shapes our whole culture.

[…]

In an increasingly noisy media landscape, the incentive is to make more noise to be heard, and that tyranny of the loud encourages the tyranny of the nasty.

It does not have to be that way. It does not. We can change the incentive. For starters, there are two things we can all do. First, don’t just stand by the sidelines when you see someone getting hurt. If someone is being abused online, do something. Be a hero. This is your chance. Speak up. Speak out. Be a good person. Drown out the negative with the positive. And second, we’ve got to stop clicking on the lowest-common-denominator, bottom-feeding linkbait.

[…]

If what gets the most clicks wins, then we have to start shaping the world we want with our clicks, because clicking is a public act. So click responsibly.

You can, and should, follow Kahn on Twitter and support her work here.

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